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Originally posted by Gigantic:
^Whites gainsay Blacks because of the relative ease by which they were able to enslave them - it is borne of contempt.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
This "relative ease" was due to some Africans offering
other Africans for sale more so than any direct raiding.

Whereas other peoples quit the abject enslaving of
their co-continentals some Africans paid it no mind
that only their fellows were still being outright marketed
up to a century ago and are to this day "clandestinely"
passing hands from one enslaver to the next.

Look at the examples of Mauritania and Niger who have
just passed laws within the last six years making slavery
(African on African) illegal this late in history, i.e., the 21st
century.

See entries on slavery in the ESR Politics&News forum
and Pictures&Videos forum.

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Originally posted by Gigantic:
^Relative ease was due to the gun.

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THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE
The First Slav[ing] Expeditions to [West] Africa
by Anthony A. Lee


Kidnapping [people] from the African coast was part of European
practice even before Portuguese ships had explored the coast of
the continent or discovered a new route to India. One of the
first expeditions to the Senegal River, led by the Portuguese
in 1444, brutally seized the black residents of several off-shore
islands near the river and carried them off to be sold as slaves.
Other expeditions from Europe about this time did more or less
the same.

But it was not long before African armies became aware of the
new dangers, and Portuguese ships began to meet their match.

For example, in 1446, two years later, a ship commanded by Nuno
Tristão attempted to land in the Senegal region. It was attacked
by African fighters in canoes, and the crew of the ship was
wiped out. And in 1447, a Danish raider commanding a Portuguese
ship was killed, along with most of his crew, when local African
boats attacked.

Although African vessels -- mostly canoes -- were not designed
for high-seas navigation, they were fully capable of protecting
the coast, even in the 15th century. As a result, in 1456, the
king of Portugal dispatched his ambassador, Diogo Gomes, to
negotiate treaties of peace and trade with the African rulers
along the coast. From that point on, and for 400 years, the
African slave trade was conducted as a matter of international
commerce among equals. The notion of European sailors roaming
through [West] Africa at will, kidnapping as many [people] as they
wanted and shipping them off to America, is completely false
-- and an insult to Africans, who kept European armies off
their soil until the beginning of the 20th century.

Of course, this fact of history makes the Atlantic slave trade
a bit more problematic, from a moral perspective. It is not
simply a question of black and white. Slavery was well known
in [many] African societies, as much as it was a fact of life
everywhere else in the world during those times.

As soon as Diogo Gomes' diplomatic expedition to West Africa
had succeeded, the export of slaves began to number in the
thousands. During the bloody course, perhaps 10 or 15 million
Africans had been delivered as slaves to the New World, and
perhaps just as many more had died in the process. These [people]
were captured in Africa by Africans, shipped to the African coast
by Africans, and only then sold to European traders in trade ships
to begin the dreaded Middle Passage to America. African kings and
rulers were active and willing participants in the slave trade,
which made them rich[er], and which could not have existed
without their full cooperation and support.

Indeed, when African kingdoms decided to stop trading in slaves
-- for their own reasons -- there was no way for European nations
to force them to continue. The earliest example of this is the
Kingdom of Benin on the West African coast (in what is now Nigeria)
In the 1520's this state began to restrict the sale of slaves,
finally cutting it off entirely by about 1550. This was probably
not done for moral reasons, however. Records from this period show
that the kingdom was becoming wealthi[er] from the export of cloth
and pepper. Although it is only a guess, we can imagine that slaves
were needed within Benin itself to produce these valuable products
which could bring more wealth to the king than the sale of human
beings.

As uncomfortable as this aspect of black history may be, it
at least explodes the myth of a "dark," helpless and ignorant
African continent that was always at the mercy of European
greed. Nothing could be further from the truth. The more we
learn about African history, going back even to the middle
ages, the more we learn that Africans were full and active
participants in the world -- on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Posts: 8179 | From: the Tekrur straddling Senegal & Mauritania | Registered: Dec 2011  |  IP: Logged |